Lukacs, Georg - Solzhenitsyn and the New Realism

7/28/2019 Lukacs, Georg - Solzhenitsyn and the New Realism

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SOLZHENITSYN AND THE NEW REALISMGeorg Lukhcs

I

IN artistic terms the relationship of the novella1 to the novel has beenoften explored, by the present writer among others. Much less has beensaid of their historical relationship and their reciprocal influence asliterature has developed. Yet here we come upon an extremely interest-ing and instructive problem, and one that throws an especially revealing

light on the contemporary situation. I refer to the recurrent fact thatthe novella makes its appearance either as the harbinger of some newconquest of reality by large-scale forms, narrative or dramatic, or elseat the close of a period, by way of rearguard or postlude. I t appears,that is to say, either at the moment ofnot yet in the subduing by thecreative imagination of some particular social epoch in its entirety, orat the moment ofno longer.

In this light Boccaccio and the Italiannovella stand out as forerunnersof the modern bourgeois novel. They give poetic shape to the world inan age when bourgeois ways of living are triumphantly on the march,

and are beginning in the most varied spheres to undermine the oldmed i ~ v a lways and to take their place; an age, however, when therecan as yet be no homogeneous pattern of things or of human relation-ships and standards of conduct, proper to a bourgeois society. On theother hand, with Maupassant the short story figures as a kind ofenvoito the world whose rise was chronicled by Balzac and Stendhal, andwhose highly questionable fulfilment was written by Flaubert and Zola.

A historical relationship of this sort can arise only on the basis ofthe specific features of the two genres. As already suggested, the dis-tinguishing feature of the novel is its homogeneous pattern, its all-inclusive scope. Drama attains the same wholeness in spite of itsdifferent content and structure. Both a imatcomprehensiveness,complete-ness, in their depiction of life; in both of them the many-sided play ofaction and reaction round the most pressing questions of the ageproduces a gallery of human types, contrasting with and complementingeach other and taking their rightful places on the stage of events. Thenovella, on the contrary, starts with an isolated case and does not gobeyond it; anything more far-reaching in its treatment emerges only byimplication. It makes no pretence of bringing social reality as a wholeunder its shaping power, not even from the viewpoint ofa single bigcontemporary issue. Its authenticity resides in the fact that such

197


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198 THE SDClALlST REGISTER, 1965exceptional cases as it treats, usually running to extremes, are possiblein a given society at a given stage in its evolution, and that their possi-bility is by itself a noteworthy feature of this stage. As a result it candispense with the details of people's origins and connections and thesituations in which they act. It can set these in motion without need of

preliminaries, and it can omit any precise, full-

scale settings. Thisessential quality of the novella, which certainly does not preclude aninexhaustible variety of inspiration, all the way from Boccaccio toChekhov, allows it to come on the historical scene either as pioneer oras rearguard of the larger literary forms, as artistic reflection of what isembryonic or what is obsolescent amid the subject-matter on which artas a whole has to work.

Needless to say, no attempt will be made here a t even the mostsketchy survey of this historical process. To forestall any misunder-standing that might arise, let it be said that the alternating r6les ofpioneer or rearguard which I have spoken of, and which are of primaryimportance for the following discussion, by no means exhaust thehistorical connection between novel and novella. This has a great manyother aspects, which I cannot discuss here. As one example of the mani-fold links that can occur, some brief mention may be made of GottfriedKeller.%In his youthful novel Der Griine Heinrich he had to turn hisback on his native Switzerland, in order to study life in the round as anovelist should. In Die Leute von Seldwyla, a cycle of contrasting andcomplementary stories, he offers us a glimpse of an all-round view oflife such as he could not fashion into full novel-form. His Switzerland,so newly introduced to capitalism, could not furnish a complex,smoothly integrated society congruent with his vision of man. Thenarratives in Das Sinngedicht, on the other hand, considered as storieswithin a story, each standing in contradiction to the next, are wellsuited to trace the ups and downs, the advances and backslidings, in theemotional development of a couple towards genuine love; life as thendirectly experienced in the world accessible to Keller could not haveallowed him to accomplish this in the unitary form of the novel. Inhis case, in short, we find a unique interweaving of embryonic andobsolescent, which does not indeed seriously invalidate the historicalconnections just outlined between novel and novella, but cannot be

accommodated to them without some adjustment. And the literaryrecord displays many other modes of interaction between the two formswhich cannot be investigated here.

With these provisos, it may be said that narrative fiction at the presentday and in the recent past has frequently receded from the novel to thenovella when it has attempted to portray sturdy human fortitude. Iwould instance such masterpieces as Conrad's Typhoon or The Shadow-

Line, or Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. The recession showsitself at once in the fact that the social foundation, the social environ-ment drawn by the novel, vanishes, and it is against a purely natural


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SOLZHENITSYN AND THE NEW REALISM 199phenomenon that the main figures have to defend themselves. The duelof the lonely hero, thrown entirely on his own resources, with Nature-a storm, a ship becalmed-may no doubt end in victory for the man,as it does in Conrad; but even when final defeat awaits him, as inHemingway, man undergoing his ordeal remains part of the essential

content of thenovella. The novels of these same writers, and not theirsalone, are in sharp contrast to their stories: in them man is engulfed,crushed, broken, warped, by the complex of social forces. There seemsto be no effective counter-force, not even the force that leads to tragedy;and since no writer of stature can be reconciled to the disappearance ofall human integrity and spiritual grandeur, this type ofnovella standsout in their works as a rearguard action in the fight for man's salvation.

In Soviet literature itself today, progressive energies are focused-leaving aside lyric poetry--on the short story. Solzhenitsyn certainlydoes not stand alone, but it is he, so far as my knowledge goes, who

has effected the decisive breach in the ideological ramparts of Stalinisttradition. The object of the following essay is to show that with himand his comrades in arms we encounter a fresh start, a first explorationof new realities, and not, as with the leading bourgeois story-writerswho have been cited, the end of an epoch.

11The capital problem of socialist-realism at the present time is a

critical appraisal of the Stalin era; this is, of course, the most urgent

task for socialist thinking altogether.I

confine myself here to the sphereof literature. If socialist-realism, which in consequence of the Stalin

era has sometimes come to be a term of scorn and abuse even insocialist countries, wishes to rediscover those heights that it scaled inthe 1920s, it must find its way back towards a genuine image ofcontemporary man. But its way thither must lie through a faithfulrecord of the Stalin decades, with all their brutalities. Sectarianbureaucrats raise the objection that one ought not to go raking into thepast, one should be content to portray the present. The past is past, theysay, already completely routed and, for men today, lost to sight. Thiskind of assertion is not only untrue, for its very utterance proves howinfluential the Stalinist cultural bureaucracy still remains: it is alsodestitute of sense. When Balzac or Stendhal depicted the Restorationperiod they were well aware that the majority of the men they weredelineating had been moulded by the Revolution, by Thermidor and itsaftermath, the Empire. Julien Sore1 or Pkre Goriot would be nothingmore than ghostly shades if they were described for us solely as theyexisted during the Restoration period, without references to theirdestinies, their growth, their past. The same applies to the literature ofthe palmy days of socialist-realism. In Sholokhov, Alexei Tolstoy, theyoung Fadeyev, and so on, the main characters are all offspring of


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200 THE SOCIALIST REGISTER, 1965

tsarist Russia; their actions in the civil war would be inexplicable toanyone ignorant of how they have come ko be where they are, since pre-war days, as a result of their experiences of the imperialist war and themonths of revolution-and, above all, of what all this has meant tothem.

Among those who are playing an active part in the socialist worldtoday there are few even now who did not in some degree experiencethe Stalin era, and whose present intellectual, moral and political make-up was not fashioned by the events of that time. The notion of thepeople at large developing towards socialism and building its founda-tions, undisturbed by the excesses of the dictatorship, is not even adaydreamer's honest delusion: those who hawk it about and turn it totheir own use are the very men who know better than anyone, fromtheir private recollections, that the Stalinist method of ruling penetratedeveryday life through and through, and that except possibly in the

remotest villages its effects were strongly felt everywhere. So expressed,this has the sound of a mere generalization, but it is one that applies todifferent people in very different ways; individual reactions to thedictatorship reveal a seemingly endless variety of attitudes. To detectonly a single pair of alternatives, as many Western commentators do,the pair represented as it were by Molotov and Koestler, is, if only bya few shades, more unrealistic and stupid than the bureaucratic versionquoted above.

If that version were really to usurp a controlling influence overwriters, we should be faced with a straightforward continuation of the

so-called

"illustrative literature

"of the Stalin era. It was a crudefalsification of contemporary life: it had no basis in the interplay of

previous conditions, nor in the matter-of-fact ambitions and doings ofordinary people, but was determined in every case, in form and contentalike, by the appropriate directives of the Party apparatus. Since this"illustrative literature" did not grow out of life, but out of glosses onofficial directives, the puppets contrived for the purpose could not have--could not be allowed to have-any past, like human beings. Insteadthey had only official dossiers, which were filled in accordance with howthey were intended to be viewed, either as "positive heroes" or as"vermin."

Crude falsification of the past is only one part of a similar, all-

rounddistortion of characters, situations, destinies, vistas, in the productionsof"illustrative literature." Thus the senseless doctrine I have quoted isno more than a consistent reproduction, brought up to date, of theStalin-Zhdanov line on literature; no more than a newfangled hindranceto the regeneration of socialist-realism, to its recapturing the ability toportray the really typical figures of an age, whose attitudes to theproblems, large and small, of their own time are fixed by the dictates ofeach individual personality and of the path that each life has followed.That each individuality is ultimately conditioned by the forces of social


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SOLZHENITSYN AND THE NEW REALISM 201history will be demonstrated more forcibly than in any other way by thislinking up of past, present, and vista of the future. It is precisely whena fiction-character of today is allowed to grow naturally out of the pasthe has lived through that the ties between man and society within his

own personality are brought to the surface and rendered unmistakablyclear. For the past, which looked at historically is the same for all, takeson a separate shape in terms of each human life; the same events aredifferently experienced by people of different descent, different position,culture, age. Even a single event is exceedingly heterogeneous in itsrepercussions on human beings, depending on whether they are faraway from it or near at hand, close to its centre or at its periphery;in fact the sheer randomness of the circumstances linking them with itwidens the range of permutations. And spiritually, in face of suchevents, no one is really passive. Everyone is confronted with a choice,

whose outcome may vary fromfirm

tenacity to compromise, prudent orfoolish, right or wrong, and so on all the way to collapse, or tosurrender.

But it is never a question merely of unique happenings and reactionsto events; rather of chains of events, and an earlier response always hasa notable bearing on a later one. It follows that without an uncoveringof the past there can be no discovery of the present. It is on this accountthat Solzhenitsyn's One Day in theLife of Ivan Denisovich represents asignificant overture to a reawakening of literature in the present epochof socialism.

The work is not, or not primarily, concerned with unveiling the

horrors of the Stalin era, the concentration camps, and the rest. Workswith such a purpose have long since been current in Western literature,but from the time when the 20th Party Congress initiated criticism of theStalin period their original power to shock has, especially in thesocialist countries, worn off. Solzhenitsyn's achievement is to haveturned an uneventful day in an anonymous camp into a literary symbolof the still undigested past, the past that is still waiting to be ordered bythe writer's art. Although the concentration camps themselves representonly the worst excess of Stalinism, he has made his chosen sector of theperiod, rendered with great artistry in tones of grey upon grey, a

microcosm of everyday life as a whole under Stalin. He has achievedthis by grappling imaginatively with the question of what demands thatage made on human beings; who succeeded in remaining human andpreserving his dignity and integrity as a man; who was able to standfirm, and how was this achieved; in what characters the substance ofhumanity was left intact, or was twisted, shattered, destroyed. Restrict-ing himself rigorously to the facts of life in a camp, Solzhenitsyn is ableto raise this question both comprehensively and definitely. The ever-shifting possibilities that political and social life offers to those whohave remained free are of course eliminated; but the choice betweenholding out or giving in imposes on living creatures so inescapable a


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to-be-or-not-to-be that every single decision is raised to a level where ittypifies a vital and universal truth.

The whole composition, whose details will be reviewed later on,serves this purpose. As the main character emphasizes at the close, tliecommonplace bit of concentration camp life that is described is one of

its"good" days. Nothing out of the ordinary takes place in fact on thisday, nothing remarkably atrocious. What we see is simply the way lifeis normally conducted in the camp, and the typical behaviour of itsinmates. This allows the specific problems to be thrown into a clearlydefined shape, while it is left to the reader's imagination to visualizethe effects on these characters of still heavier burdens. The utmosteconomy of literary treatment matches this basic tendency of a workalmost ascetic in its absorption in the essential. Of the world outsidenothing is alluded to except what is indispensable because of its influenceon men's inner lives; of their spiritual world nothing except such

impulses as are directly and prominently related to their human core,and even of these only a very sparing selection. Hence the work, thoughnot planned on symbolist lines, can make its powerful impact as asymbol, and everyday problems of Stalin's world, even when they haveno direct connection with concentration camps, are also illuminatedby it.

This very abstract summary of Solzhenitsyn's work will be enough toshow that in spite of its striving by dint of factual delineation towardsthe fullest possible completeness, towards a counterpoint of humantypes and destinies, it belongs thematically to the category of the shortstory ornovella, and not to that of the novel, however short. Solzhenit-syn deliberately leaves out any distant view of things. Life in the camp isexhibited as a permanent condition, scattered references to particularprisoners finishing their terms are left extremely vague, and it neveroccurs to anyone even in a daydream to imagine the camp itself evercoming to an end. In the case of the central figure what is stressed isthat the country he knows has been altering very greatly, there is nochance of his ever returning to the old world he once lived in; this toointensifies the isolation of the camp. In every direction a thick veilhangs over the future. All that is foreseeable is a series of days muchalike; some better, some worse, but none different at bottom. Reference

to the bygone is equally sparing. Occasional hints about how individualscame to be in the camp reveal by their laconic, matter-of-fact brevityjust how arbitrary are the sentences of the judicial and administrative,military and civilian courts. Not a word is said about grand politicaltopics such as the great trials: they are submerged in an inky past. Noris the personal injustice of transportation, which is only touched on inodd cases, overtly censured; it appears simply as hard fact, as theordained precondition of this camp existence. Thus everything thatmay, or rather must, form the task of the great novels or dramas thatwill one day be written, is with thorough-going, conscious artistry


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SOLZHENITSYN AND m NEW REALISM 203excised and banished. Here may be seen a resemblance in point ofliterary form, but of form alone, to other outstanding noi~ellasearliermentioned. There is no question, however, as in those cases, of a retreatfrom larger forms, but rather of a first coming to grips with reality inthe search for the larger forms corresponding to it.

The socialist world today is on the eve of a renaissance uf Marxismwhich is not called upon merely to restore its original system, sogrievously distorted by Stalin, but which will be directed first and fore-most towards a full comprehension of the new data of reality by thelight of the concepts, at once old and new, of genuine Marxism. In theliterary field an identical duty faces socialist-realism. Any continuationof what was praised and honoured in the Stalin era as socialist-realismwould be futile. But I amconvinced that they are equally mistaken whoprophesy an early grave for socialist-realism, and who want tore-christen as"realism" everything from western Europe since Expres-

sionism and Futurism and abolish all use of the term"socialist."Whensocialism recaptures its true nature, and feels once again its artisticresponsibility in face of the great problems of its age, mighty forcesmay be set moving towards the creation of a new socialist literature ofactuality. In this process of transformation and renewal, which impliesfor socialist-realism an abrupt change of direction from that of theStalin era, Solzhenitsyn's story constitutes in my opinion a milestoneon the road to the future.

Such first swallows of a literary spring may, of course, be of import-ance historically, as heralds of a new age, without necessarily possessing

any special artistic talent. This might be said of Lillo, and after himDiderot, as the inventors of middle-class drama. I have no doubt how-ever that Solzhenitsyn occupies a different historical niche. Diderot'stheory of social conditions as the focal point of dramatic interestbrought within the range of tragedy a valuable new province; the parthe played as pioneer is not nullified by our recognition of the mediocrityof his own dramas, though it amounts only to a theorizer's discoveryof something in the abstract. Solzhenitsyn's achievement has not beento win a new province for literature, that of life in the concentrationcamp. On the contrary his mode of presentation, concerned with the

normal life of the Stalin era and the alternatives it put before humanity,displays its real originality in its way of dealing with the problems ofhuman beings holding out, or succumbing. When the concentrationcamp is perceived as a symbol of life in general as it then was, thedepiction of details of life in the camp becomes, from the point of viewof the future, only an item in the all-embracing sweep of the newliterature now announcing itself. In this literature everything that is ofsignificance for individual or social conduct now, everything that goesto make up the vital prehistory of our present, requires to be givenartistic shape.


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I11In this single day of Ivan Denisovich readers have found a symbol of

the Stalin era. Yet no trace of symbolism is to be found in Solzhenitsyn'spresentation. He gives a faithful, authentic excerpt from life, with none

of its elements brought forward so as to acquire a heightened, or over-heightened, meaning, and thus qualify as a symbol. Certainly in thisspecimen-bit of life the fortunes and the behaviour typical of millionsof people are registered in concentrated form. Solzhenitsyn's simplefidelity to nature has nothing in common either with literal naturalismor with any technically more sophisticated modification of it. Contem-porary discussion of realism, and socialist-realism first of all, neglectsthe really fundamental issues, not least because it loses sight of thedistinction between realism and naturalism. In the "illustrative litera-ture" of Stalin's day realism was supplanted by an officially prescribed

naturalism, combined with a so-

called revolutionary-

romanticism,officially prescribed likewise. On the level of abstract theory, no doubt,if nowhere else, naturalism was contrasted in the 'thirties with realism.But this abstract idea could be clothed in flesh and blood only by beingset in opposition to the "illustrative literature"; for in practice themanipulators of literature denounced all facts not in accord with govern-ment regulations-though they denounced no other kind of facts-as"naturalistic." In harmony with this system a writer could rise abovenaturalism only by choosing to describe exclusively such facts as sup-ported directly or indirectly the official policies whose literary "illus-

tration"

the piece of writing in question was to undertake. Thus thefixing of standards became a purely governmental matter. Without anyregard to the characters' own springs of action, and their own natures,the standard-setting took for granted a positive or negative judgmentof their behaviour decided purely by whether this appeared to promoteor to obstruct the execution of government policy. Plots and figureswere excessively contrived, yet they could not escape a good measure ofnaturalism. For it can be said to characterize this style that i t does notcombine detailed facts with one another or with their human agentsand the destinies of the latter by any inherent logic. Its details remaincolourless and lifeless, or they may be exaggeratedly precise, as theauthor's own bent may determine; but they never enter into the subject-matter so as to form an organic unity, since they are, on principle, onlystuck on to it from outside. I would remind the reader of the scholasticdebates about how far, or how markedly, apositive hero may, or should,have negative qualities as well. Implicit in them is a denial of the factthat in literature the all-important thing, the alpha and omega of thecreative process, is the actual, unique human being; and an assumptionthat men and their destinies can and ought to be treated like marionettes.

If, as many now desire, modern Western techniques are to take theplace of an antiquated socialist-realism, the naturalistic basis of the


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SOLZHENITSYN AND THE NEW REALISM 205prevailing trends in modernist literature are being altogether overlookedin both camps. I have pointed out repeatedly in a number of contextsthat the various trends which have broken away, each in its turn, frompure naturalism, have all preserved intact its inbred lack of innercohesion, its chaotic structure, its elimination of any close union betweenreality and appearance. They have got away from the naturalisticobsession with literal reproduction, but only to replace it by a one-sidedly subjective or one-sidedly objective vision which, from the pointof view of first principles, leaves the basic difficulty of naturalism essen-tially untouched. This applies to these literary tendencies in general,not to the notable exceptions and their special successes. GerhartHauptmann in The Weavers, or Beaver-skin, is not in an artistic sensea naturalist; whereas the great mass of Expressionists, Surrealists, andso forth have never really broken free from naturalism. From this angleit is easy to understand why a large proportion of those who are against

the socialist-realism of the Stalin era should seek asylum in modernistliterature and fancy they have found it there. But the required trans-formation cannot possibly be accomplished on this level of purelyemotional impulse: there must first be a revolution in the relationbetween writers and social reality, they must transcend the naturalismthat underlies their position, and both experience and think out thegrand problems of our age. To take a merely subjective step forwardthey need not make any break a t all with"illustrative literature"; evenin the 'thirties there were novels about industrialization that toed theParty line yet made use of all the resources of Expressionism, the "new

objectivity,"

the montage-style, etc., and differed from the averageofficial product of the period in these superficial technicalities alone.There is some evidence that the same state of affairs may return today,and it must in fact be pointed out that a rejection of the old official cultwhich is confined within merely subjective limits is very far fromdenoting a full intellectual and cultural victory over it.

Solzhenitsyn's story stands quite aloof from all the tendencies con-tained in naturalism. I have spoken already of the extreme parsimonyof his style of presentation. This explains why his details are alwayshighly significant. As in every work of art worth the name, their special

shades of meaning arise from the nature of the subject-

matter itself.We are in a concentration camp: every bit of bread, every piece of rag,every scrap of stone or metal that can be turned into a tool may helpto prolong life; but along with this goes the risk, if you carry one ofthem on you when you are marched out of camp to work, o r if you hideit anywhere, of discovery, confiscation, even solitary confinement indarkness. Every look or gesture of a superior demands a prompt andcorrect reaction, and here too the wrong guess may conjure up seriousdangers; on the other hand there are situations, at meal-times forinstance, where a strong will properly directed can lead to an extrahelping; and so o n and so forth. Hegel stresses as one corner-stone of


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the epic greatness of the Homeric poems the striking part played inthem by impressive and accurate description of eating, drinking, sleep,physical toil. In ordinary bourgeois life such functions on the wholelose their intrinsic weight, and only the very greatest men have the skill,like Tolstoy, to bring back again these complex sharings of experience.

Comparisons of this sort can of course only serve to throw light on theproblems of writing that we are considering, and should not be takenas in any way suggesting equivalence of literary stature.

Significance of detail in Solzhenitsyn has a quite special function,connected with the nature of his subject: it throws into relief the crush-ing constriction of camp routine, its monotony perpetually fraught withperil, the minute and ceaseless movements needed for preservation ofbare existence. Each small point marks a parting of ways betweensafety and ruin; each circumstance can give rise to fateful consequences,beneficial or disastrous. In this light the fact of any odd things being just

what they are, a fact always in itself fortuitous, is inextricably andvisibly bound up with the unfolding fates of odd individuals. And thusthe life of the camp in its overwhelming entirety emerges from a mosteconomical use ofhaterials; the organizedsum total of a plain, meagrestatement of fact constitutes a svmbolic whole, with a meaning for allhumanity, and shedding lightonin importantphase of man's evolution.

On this organic foundation we see arising a new and distinct speciesofnovella, and the parallels and points of contrast between it and thegreat modern noveNas of the bourgeois world already mentioned helpus to interpret the historical location of each. In each case man has to

struggle againsta

potent and hostile environment whose cruelty andinhumanity betray its elemental character. In Conrad or Hemingwaythis hostile environment is, in fact, Nature: with Conrad it may bestorm or calm, but even when a purely human fate is at work, as inThe End ofthe Tetl~er,it is the onset of blindness, the cruelty of his ownbiological nature, that the old captain has to resist. The social side ofhuman relations recedes into the background, and not seldom fadesto vanishing-point. Man is set in conflict with Nature herself, and in theconflict he must save himself by his own strength, or perish. In this duelevery detail counts, therefore, whether it be something fateful for theman as he is watched from outside or something that brings before his

own mind the alternatives of salvation or catastrophe. Since man andNature confront each other face to face, natureimages can take on aHomeric breadth without any lessening of their fateful intensity: theyare the means whereby the interweaving of fate and human agent canbe carried to repeated climaxes of meaning. But once more, the pre-eminently social quality of men's relations with one another fades andeven vanishes; and that is why such novellas must be said to stand atthe end of a literary epoch.

With Solzhenitsyn too the complex of things portrayed has beenendowed with elemental features. It is simply there, as a brute fact,


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SOLZHENITSYN AND THE NEW REALISM 207having no ascertainable origin in the currents of human life, notevolving into any further form of social existence. Yet it is after all,through and through, an "artificial Nature," a mesh of social factors.Elemental as its operations may appear, inexorably cruel, senseless,inhuman, they are all none the less consequences of human deeds, and

the human being who has to protect himself against them must standtowards them quite otherwise than towards Nature proper.Hemingway's old fisherman can feel sympathy and admiration for themighty creature whose stubborn resistance almost destroys him. Nosuch attitude is conceivable towards the myrmidons of Solzhenitsyn's"artificial Nature." A smothered revolt against them, even though heeschews any blatant expression of it, is latent in every fragment ofdialogue, every gesture. Life's bare physical reactions, like hunger orshivering with cold, are in the last resort governed by the relation ofman to man. Survival or failure are always, unconditionally, social

facts; they are connected, even if this is never proclaimed in the story,with the real life that is to come, life in freedom amongst other free men.Admittedly the elemental fact of simple physical survival or annihila-

tion is also involved; but on a broad view it is the social factor thatpredominates. For Nature really is independent of beings like us; shecan be brought into subjection by our practical knowledge, but heressence remains inevitably unchangeable. However crassly elemental an"artificial Nature" may seem, it is nevertheless built out of humanrelationships, it is of our own making. Hence the healthy attitude to it,when all is said, is the instinct to alter, improve, humanize. The true

quality of all its details, the way they are, their appearance, theirinteractions and intertwinings, are invariably communal in character,even when their sources in community life are not directly disclosed.Here too Solzhenitsyn restricts himself to an ascetic frugality of com-ment, but the very objectivity of his presentation, the elemental savageryand inhumanity revealed in an institution of the human family, delivera more devastating verdict than any emotional rhetoric could havedone. In the same manner his austere turning away from any farhorizon conceals, so to speak, an unseen horizon. Every resistance orretreat points a silent finger at the more normal human relationships

of the future: it is a prologue in dumb-show to a truly human lifeamong other men that is still to come. Thus the segment of life we see

here is not a dead end, it is society's prelude to its own future. It isworth adding that within the sphere of individual existence conflictwith Nature herself can help to mould human character, as it does inConrad's The S/iadow-Line,but her influence goes no further than theindividual. The captain inTyphoonwins through, but as Conrad himselfreminds us, we have seen only an interesting episode, without anywider consequences.

We are brought back to the symbolic effect of Solzhenitsyn's story.Without overtly doing so it supplies a prologue in miniature for the


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coming challenge by the creative spirit of ar t to the Stalin rigime whenfragments of life like this were really representative of everydaylife at large. I t is a prelude to the reshaping of the present, of the worldinhabited by those who passed through that "school," whether theydid so in their own persons or at second hand, whether actively or

passively, whether strengthened by it or broken, and who were formedby it for the life of today and for active participation in it. That is theparadoxical aspect of Solzhenitsyn's position as a writer. His laconiclanguage, his abstention from any allusion to anything lying beyond theimmediacy of life in the camp, nevertheless draw in outline those centralethical problems apart from which the men of today could neitherexist nor be understood. It is by its concentration on economy andrestraint that this severely limited extract from life becomes an over-ture to the great literature of the future.

The other stories by Solzhenitsyn that are known to me are ladenwith no such symbolic, far-reaching meaning. Yet perhaps for this veryreason they are marked just as plainly by the same groping into the pastin the search for a means of laying hold on the present; more plainlystill, as we shall see, in their final effect. This looking towards thepresent is least in evidence in the fine story Matryona's House, whereSolzhenitsyn paints, as some of his contemporaries have done, a villageworld far from anywhere, whose people and way of life have been littleaffected by socialism and its Stalinist growth. That situations of thiskind can exist is not unimportant in an all-round view of our age, butit is in no degree central to it. We are given a portrait of an old womanwho has experienced and suffered much, has often been deceived and

always exploited, whose deep goodness of soul and serenity are utterlyunshakable; the example of a being whose humanity nothing coulddestroy or disfigure. It is a portrait in the great Russian realist tradition,though with Solzhenitsyn only the tradition in general is discernible,not any stylistic inheritance from a particular master. This link with thebest Russian models of the past can be recognized likewise in his other

novellas. The fabric of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is puttogether similarly from the moral resemblances and contrasts among anumber of principal characters. The dominant figure is a shrewdpeasant who can play his cards adroitly but never abandons his self-

respect. With him is contrasted on the one hand the once choleric navalcaptain who risks existence itself rather than allow an indignity to passwithout protest, and on the other hand the crafty squad-leader whodefends the interests of his fellow-workers against the authorities skil-fully, but at the same time utilizes them so as to improve his ownrelatively privileged status.A more dynamic story, much more closely bound up with the

dilemmas of the Stalin era, is On the Kreshchovka Station, where thesocial morality of that time of crisis and its "state of alert" are at thecentre of interest. It discloses through the medium of a dualism of


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SOLZHENITSYN AN D THE NEW REALISM 209opposites how Stalinist slogans, reduced to clichks, distort all life's realproblems. Here, too, and again in keeping with thenovella form, thereis only the detached conflict of individuals and its momentary resolu-tion, without any indication of what after-effects the decision nowtaken is to have on the participants' lives, on their development up

to today. But in this case the collision is so managed that the tensions itsets up produce ripples overflowing the boundaries of the story. Thechoice imposed by the "state of alert," the campaign for "vigilance,"was not merely a burning problem of those vanished days: its conse-quences, in the shape of those forces that have moulded the moralpersonality of so many people, are still at work today. Solzhenitsyn'sconcentration camp story could renounce stoically any glimpse of adistant horizon, any allusion to the present, not simply in the narrativeitself but even in the imagination of the reader which often, if he is theright reader, supplies what is left unsaid. Now on the contrary the

question is put to us with intentionally painful frankness: how will theenthusiastic young officer get over this experience, what kind of manwill it make of him, and of many others like him, to have been the doerof such a deed?

A still more remarkable illustration of this type ofnovella, artisticallyjust as appropriate to the genre as the other one, is provided by Solz-henitsyn's latest work, For the Good of the Cause, which provoked loudapplause and violent condemnation in the Soviet literary world. Herehe boldly takes up the challenge hurled by the sectarians at the friendsof progressive literature-thedemand for writing about the constructive

enthusiasm felt by the broad masses even during the reign of the"

cultof personality," as something quite separate from Stalinism. The storyconcerns the rebuilding of a technical school in a provincial city. Itsold premises are quite inadequate, there is not sufficient room for thestudents; the authorities are putting bureaucratic delays in the way ofthe new buildings that are required. But the teachers and pupils are agenuine collective, united by mutual respect, even affection. Theyvolunteer to undertake the major part of the construction work them-selves during their holidays, and they complete it in time for thebeginning of the next school year. The tale opens with a brisk, animated

account of the work being finished, of the sincere trust and the frankdiscussions between teachers and pupils, and their expectation of ahappier lot in the setting they themselves have created. Then suddenlya committee of officials turns up, makes a very superficial inspection ofthe old premises, declares them to be in perfect condition, and hands thenew building over to another institution. The desperate efforts of thePrincipal, even though assisted by someone of goodwill in the Partymachine, are of course in vain; in the Stalin era it is useless to strugglein however righteous a cause against the bureaucratic caprices ofofficialdom.

That is all; but it is enough for a crushingly accurate refutation of


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210 THE SOCIALIST REGISTER, 1965the sectarian official myth of genuine, active enthusiasm under Stalin.No rational person has ever disputed that there really was suchenthusiasm, now and then. Truth becomes myth with the notion that itwas possible for socialist idealism to deploy itself fruitfully side byside with and unhindered, or actually encouraged, by the reigning cult.Solzhenitsyn shows us one burst of popular energy, and at the sametime the usual fate that Stalinist bureaucracy has in store for it. The taleends, like his other writings, at the point where the contradiction standsbefore us as large as life, but once again without any indication ofthreads of human destiny leading onward to man as he is today. Andonce again the external framework is closely restricted, as the spirit ofthe novella requires; only enough detail is supplied, either about theearlier negligence of the officials or about the ultimate arbitrary decisionof the higher authorities, to establish a factual report, though anextremely convincing one. Solzhenitsyn succeeds here too, with his

frugal, dispassionate style and his abstention from comment, in throw-ing into relief what is typical in the facts thus presented. This is of coursefar from being a question purely of method. He can fulfil his ambitiousdesign only through having the gift, with his technique of suggestion,of making all his characters and suggestions come to life and impress usas typical. The origins of this bureaucracy and the groupings within it,the private career-interests at work behind all the high-soundingdevotion to the Cause, these remain outside the bounds of the narrative,and are felt only as an all-pervading something to be taken for granted.The bureaucrats themselves certainly are brought before us very

vividly, with their inhumanity masquerading as practical sense, butthey are not illuminated from within, either as citizens or as men. Wehave a more individualized picture of the teachers and students in theirexultant mood at the outset, though it is confined to what the brevityinseparable from the novella permits; the mood is so strong that thememory evoked from time to time of the "Communist Saturdays" ofthe civil war years has no sound at all of hollow rhetoric.

But once more, and quite justifiably from the point of view of literaryform, the conclusion is abrupt: the curtain falls as soon as the bare factshave been unfolded, and the underlying questions, the problems ofburning concern t o us today, are left unanswered. What effect did these

and similar experiences and lessons have on those teachers and stu-dents?-

how deeply were their later lives coloured by them?-

whatsort of members of the human family of today did they grow into? Theconclusion is only sufficiently definite to prompt an intelligent reader toask these questions, and in his mind they will long continue to rever-berate and pulsate. Again, then, the Stalinist past points imperiouslytowards the fundamental issues of the present day, and this time farmore distinctly and unequivocally, with far greater force and urgency,than in all the earlier stories. As a result this noveNa cannot be as com-plete in itself, as fully rounded off and self-contained, asIvanDenisoviclz,


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SOLZHENITSYN AND THENEWREALISM 211and in a narrowly artistic sense therefore it does not reach the samelevel. All the same, as a groping towards the future it represents a longstep forward by comparison with its predecessors.

IVWhen this onward march will be completed, and whether by

Solzhenitsyn himself or by others, or by some other single writer, issomething nobody today can foresee. Solzhenitsyn is by no means theonly one who is preoccupied with this consanguinity of yesterday andtoday, as perhaps a reference to Nekrassov is enough to make clear.Nobody can say now what form will be taken by the final effort tounravel the present by means of an interpretation of the Stalin era, thatmoral pre-history of almost everyone active today. The decisive factorwill be the unfolding of our social existence, the revival and renewal of

socialist consciousness in the socialist countries, especially in the SovietUnion; although every Marxist must take account of the inevitableunevenness of ideological development, with regard t o art and literaturemost of all.

Our review cannot go further, therefore, than to state what isirresistibly certain to happen, leaving completely open the question ofhow it will come about, or through what agencies. One thing we maybe sure of is that there are grave hindrances and impediments to thenew blossoming of socialist-realism, obstruction above all by thosewho have remained faithful to Stalinist precept and practice, or at any

rate act as if they have. True, open opposition by them to any newflowering has been muffled for the time being by a variety of events,but they acquired skill of manoeuvre in the school ofStalin, and obstaclesunderhandedly thrown in the way may in some circumstances do moredamage to what is new and immature and frequently unsure of itselfthan brutal measures of coercion of the old-fashioned sort, though eventhese have not disappeared and can still work great mischief.

On the other hand, progress towards something genuinely new maybe hampered and led astray by the sort of intellectually banal squabblesthat are to the fore nowadays with us, about modernism in a shallow,merely technical or stylistic sense. As already pointed out, nothing ofreal importance can be accomplished by such means, since the realartistic problem is that of overcoming, on the broadest front, the view oflife from which nearly everystyle founded on naturalism derives. So longas many of our writers are hypnotized by technical nostrums, and assum-ing that the faction still loyal to Stalinism cultivates somewhat moreflexible tactics, the situation of the 'thirties as decribed above may easilyrepeat itself; in other words, what one might call a "Durrell style"may be so employed as to divert attention from the real problems ofthe age. Admittedly some things are coming out even in this field thathave to be taken seriously. In many people, Stalinism destroyed faith in


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212 THE~SOCIALISTREGISTER, 1965

socialism. On the subjective level the doubts and disillusionments itengendered may well be perfectly honest and sincere; and yet when theyseek to express themselves they may very easily produce nothing morethan a campfollowing of Western tendencies.

Even when works so inspired are interesting from a purely aestheticpoint of view, they seldom avoid some degree of mere imitativeness.Kafka's vision was really and truly fixed on the murky nothingness ofthe epoch that gave birth to Hitler, on something disastrously actual,whereas the nihilism of a Becket is no more than a game with imaginaryabysses, no longer corresponding to anything vital in historical actuality.I am aware that in intellectual quarters for more than a century nowscepticism and pessimism, however questionable their manifestationshave been a t each turning-point, have come to be considered far moredistinguished than faith in the great cause of human progress. YetGoethe's words at Valmy3 point more meaningfully to the future than

Schiller's words about "women turning into hyaenasT4 and they pointtoo in Goethe's own work towards Faust's last speech.= Shelley ismore original and more lasting than Chateaubriand, and Keller learnedmore lessons from 1848, and more fruitful ones, than Stifter. In thesame way today the march of world history and world literature dependsprimarily on those whom the Stalin era has only spurred on to deepenand bring up to date their socialist conviction. The most honest andgifted among those who have lost this conviction and are turning out"interesting"works in the wake of Western vogues, will be seen, oncethe energies today hidden or only dawning are fully released, as no

more than epigones.Let me repeat that it is not my purpose here to go into the business

ofavant-gardism.I recognize that writers like Brecht, the later ThomasWolfe, Elan Morante, Boll and others have created striking, novel, andprobably enduring works. What I am concerned with is simply the factthat when disillusionment with socialism foregathers with the literarymodes of the sceptical, alienated Westerner, in the long run the outcomeis likely to be a brood of imitators. I t may be superfluous to add thatthe only way for honest people to get the better of a disappointmentwith some sides of life is through life itself, through living their lives

face to face with the truth of history and society. Literary argumentationby itself is futile; while attempts to drive and dragoon the artist canserve merely to lend esoteric fashions a more aristocratic air, and torepel honest seekers after socialism more thoroughly than ever.

In my view Solzhenitsyn and those who share his aims are remotefrom any merely fonnal experimentation. They are trying, in bothhuman and intellectual terms, both as citizens and as artists, to worktheir way through to those realities that have always been the starting-point of genuine innovations in artistic form. All Solzhenitsyn's writingshitherto exemplify this, and the links between them and the complex of

difficulties in the way of the regeneration of Marxism today are equally


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SOLZHENITSYN AND THE NEW REALISM 213easy to trace. Any pronouncement on the style of the epoch now athand, any effort to anticipate what the future will bring, would bereducing speculation to idle scholasticism, gsthetics to mere bickering.What is a t present discernible may be summed up as follows. The greatliterature awaited by the socialism now in course of renewal cannotpossibly, and least of all in the ultimate, decisive questions of form,prove a straightforward continuation from the first outburst of socialistliterature, i t cannot mean a return to the 'twenties. For the pattern ofsocial tensions, the quality and character of people and their relationswith one another, have altered radically since then. Every genuinestyle is founded on the ability of writers to seize those particular elementsin the pattern and motive forces of the life of their age that characterizeit most profoundly, and on their capacity-the acid test of true origin-ality-to discover a corresponding form, fit to mirror these and to givesuitable expression to their deepest, most unique and yet most typical

identity. Authors in the 'twenties painted the stormy transition frombourgeois to socialist society. From the security of peace-time,unbounded as this of course appeared on the surface, the way forwardat that time led through war and civil war to socialism. People werefaced with an imposingly dramatic decision, and had to choose forthemselves which side they wanted to belong to; often they had toundergo a translation, which might be explosive, from one class-exist-ence to another. I t was by conditions like these that the style ofsocialist-realism in the 'twenties was determined.

Today's strains and stresses are of a wholly different sort, with

regard both to the structure of society and to its motive forces. Resound-ing conflict out in the open has become rare and exceptional. Over

lengthy periods the surface of social life seems to alter little, and whatchanges can be detected come about slowly, each in its turn. By con-trast, a radical transformation has been going on for decades in men'sinner lives, which, it goes without saying, already exerts its influenceon the social surface and as time goes on will play a steadily growingpart in the shaping of our whole way of life. In the art of today as inthat of a more distant past the accent falls on man's inward life andconscience, on his moral decisions, which cannot be expressed, it maybe, in any external act. I t would be quite wrong however to see in thispredominance of the subjective in art any analogy with certain Westernmovements where the alienation of individual from society seems tohold absolute sway and generates an inner life boundless in appearance,impotent in reality. What is meant here is not any such analogy, butthe fact that there may be a long chain of crises of conscience, most ofwhich cannot as things are, or can only in exceptional circumstances,crystallize into outward action; although the ways in which they dis-close themselves may be dramatic, often bordering on the tragic. Whatmatters is how rapidly and deeply the people experiencing these thingsbecome fully aware of the perils that Stalinism embodied, how they


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react to this knowledge, and how their conduct nowadays is influencedby their accumulated experiences of those days: by whether they wereable then to hang on, or fell by the wayside-whether they stood firm,or were crushed, or came to terms, or capitulated. And it is clear thatthe truest way to keep faith is to reject Stalinist distortions and therebyto consolidate and deepen all really Marxist, really socialist convictions,at the same time preparing them to face fresh problems.

I t is needless to go further, for this is not the place for any attempt todescribe even cursorily the period we are living through as a whole, itshistorical roots, or the divergent lines of human behaviour mostcharacteristic of it. My object has been to bring to light those livingrealities which unanswerably prescribe for socialist-realism today adifferent style from the one that conditions in the 'twenties prescribedfor literature then. The foregoing brief commentary will have served, Ibelieve, to substantiate this thesis, and the conclusion thus reached must

suffice. I will add only that Solzhenitsyn's novella form is an organicgrowth of the soil of our age. Where the next generation of writers willseek their point of departure must be left to them."Jeprends mon bien02je le trouve": this has always been the motto of original and significantwriters, who have always gladly but with a due sense of responsibilityaccepted the risk that every selection involves, the risk of whether their"good" will really turn out well or not. It is a risk that lesser writerssometimes take carelessly or frivolously. However fully theory may beable to predict the larger social contours of the changes to be expected,it is just as fully bound to withhold discussion of all actual works of art

until after the event.

Translated byM. A .L.Brown

NOTES

I . Novella: a prose form, intermediate in length between the novel and the shortstory, very popular with German writers from the late eighteenth to the earlytwentieth century. The action of a novella usually concerns one particular situa-

tion, conflict, event or aspect of a personality on which the work exclusively con-centrates. Thenovella in this specific sense was first used in fourteenth-centuryItaly, andBoccaccio's mastery of the form inspired Goethe in particular to ex-periment with it in German. (Trans.)

2. Gottfried Keller, 1819-90. A Swiss novelist and poet whose largely autobio-graphical novel Der Griine Heinrich tells of a young Swiss who leaves his homeland to study art in Germany. From boyhood he had been isolated from hisfellows, but in Munich he gradually resolves to renounce his artistic pretensionsand devote himself to the social and moral well-being of his owncountry and itscitizens. Die Leute von Seldwyla and D m Sinngedicht are both novella cycles.The former is unified by its setting-an imaginary but typical Swiss village--inwhich varied incidents involving different characters allow Keller to commenton the virtues and deficiencies of Swiss life. Das Sinngedichf, by contrast, has a


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SOLZHENITSYN AND THE NEW REALISM 215definite thematicunity.Despite the variedsubject-matter, theproblemof marriageand the relations between the sexes is common to all sixnovellas in the latter.(Trans.)

3. Goethe's comment on the battle of Valmy, the victory of the French revolution-ary troops over the Pmssiansand Austrians in 1792."There begins here and nowanew epoch in world history." (Goethe: Die Campagne in Frankreich. Trans.)

4. Schiller in Das Lied von der Glocke (1799) alludes clearly though not explicitlyto the French Revolution in his apocalyptic vision (e.g. the words quoted) ofthe horrors which come about when a nation is transformed by revolution.(Trans.)

5. Immediately before his death Faust has a vision of the future, of a communityliving free from restraint, in a pastoral Utopia threatened constantly by the sea.Provided the members of the community constantly maintain the sea-defencesand work their land, their happiness and security are assured. (Tlans.)

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Lukacs, Georg - Solzhenitsyn and the New Realism